A Story

When I was in high school, my musician friend George would take me around to jam with various musicians whom he somehow knew. There was a fantastic guitar player that held forth magnificently in little more than a shack in the woods. I seem to remember being able to see sky through the roof. I can’t believe that he had enough power for the amps, or that it was safe enough that we didn’t get electrocuted. Or at least get a shock like when we’d play in Jack’s garage, and I’d be playing my guitar with enthusiasm and then touch my lip to that one Electro-Voice microphone that I owned.

Another time we visited an amazing blind keyboard player at some house in South Jackson. We didn’t play at asll on that day, and I don’t remember why we were even there. My vague memory was that a bunch of us (most of whom were strangers to me) were crowded into a living room while the keyboard player held forth. I don’t remember his name or what ever happened to him. But he was really good.

These were exciting connections into communities of people quite different from my “white bread” life at the time. I was struck by a feeling of being “othered” by the “other”, and I secretly wanted to be more like them. This tapping into a mysterious and vital “other” world reminds me of a favorite quote from a short story by Eudora Welty, Powerhouse:

 “Powerhouse is so monstrous he sends everybody into oblivion. When any group, any performers, come to town, don’t people always come out and hover near, leaning inward about them, to learn what it is? What is it? Listen.”

That’s right, listen. Transcendent expression. Something so compelling it takes over the brain, the body, the everything. You forget who you are, where you are. Power. I wanted that power, but I never seemed to achieve it. It was always, not simply out of reach, but far, far away, a faint and distant and aspirational apparition.

A few weeks after I got to college, in my freshman year, a friend of a friend of George’s looked me up and invited me to come play with some folks in a rather dingy neighborhood in northwest Houston. I had an amp and my 335 and a car, so I went. It was at a small, somewhat shabby ranch, with not much furniture. A couple of the musicians lived there. In the living room, a sofa and chair and coffee table had been pushed to the side to make room for a drum set, a couple of amps, a cheap PA with two mics, and Vox Continental organ, played through a Fender Princeton Reverb amp. That was the same organ used on ? and the Mysterians’ 96 Tears, so although it would have been cooler to have a Hammond B-3, it was still cool. I remember that the first thing we did to warm up was play a medium tempo blues shuffle in A – perfect. I had practiced stretching the G string from D to E, getting just the right vibrato, for hours, days, years. I was nervous, but it felt good.

We worked up a set of blues and roots music – Stormy Monday, Sweet Home Chicago, Parchman Farm, Little Red Rooster, some jams – enough to fill out a set, especially if the audience would let us stretch out. After a few short weeks of rehearsing – if you can call it that – we were able to get a Monday night gig at a place in Montrose, I think maybe Rosewater’s. We went over well with the crowd, so we ended up playing a fairly steady weekly gig. I got a lot better on guitar, and maybe once or twice most nights I got a little taste of what I was looking for. During a solo, and it may have been my imagination, but I had a sense that folks were hovering near, leaning in toward the band, wanting intensely to “learn what it is”. That was the best. And I was beginning to get a bit of a reputation in Houston as a pretty good guitar player.

My grades started to suffer. I was struggling to juggle it all. My father was pretty upset, very upset actually, and he made me bring my guitar and amp back to Mississippi so I could focus one hundred percent on my schoolwork. I tried, I really did, but the work was hard, and I eventually found somebody to lend me a guitar. Then I rejoined the band. I didn’t love the particular guitar – I felt most at home with my 335 – but I got used to it, and I slipped right back into regular gigging. Fortunately I was able to scrape together enough cash from the gigs to buy a cheap, used amp. A smaller amp was actually ideal for getting that elusive, “authentic” distortion that guitar players were always looking for.

I wanted to play all the time, and my bandmates felt pretty much exactly the same. Since it was bit of a hike driving up from campus, I started to crash at the house. It rains a lot in Houston, steady rains for what seems like days on end, so just staying inside and playing was as easy as could be. And of course I started to cut classes. At first it was just once or twice a week, but eventually I quit going to class at all. I wasn’t eating well either; I had been getting most of my meals on campus – they were paid for – but now I was avoiding the long drive and was resorting instead to such cheap delights as “spaghetti alla store brand ketchup”. I could convince myself that this classic tomato sauce substitute carried more than a hint of fine dining.

This was a stressful time, to put it mildly. I felt constantly anxious except when I was playing. So of course I played more. I had my guitar with me when I watched TV, when I ate breakfast, when I was just hanging around, even when I was driving around town. OK, not the last one. But bit by bit I had become the best guitar player around. No, really, people started to come from out of town to hear me. One person from Port Arthur, who went to high school with Janis Joplin, said I was the best he’d ever heard. At my best, I sent everyone into oblivion, just like Powerhouse. I was monstrous.

But how to manage the stress? I would get in my car, usually at night, hop onto a freeway, drive a while, get off at a random and unfamiliar exit. Then I would drive for a bit, turn left or right, drive a bit more, turn again, and try to get lost. I really needed to get lost, for everything to be unfamiliar, for a feeling of no context, of anonymity, of no expectations. Even back then, Houston was a mess of sprawl, so you could drive and drive. And I didn’t know the city very well. It was very calming. Finally I would try to figure out how to get back to the house. And I always could, eventually. It could be as simple as driving in one direction until you hit a freeway; then you could figure out a way home. Except for the price of the gas, this was a pretty good way to keep it together emotionally.  

Well, while I did think I could keep it together, I guess it’s no surprise that I flunked out. And, as I began to navigate the rocky way forward, drugs were both a big help. And they were the worst thing ever.

So how did I get from this low point to where I am now? Well, that’s another story …

Keep it together as best you can, and please keep listening.

[DISCLAIMER: Very little of this is true. Lies, lies, always lies.]